SPINOSAURUS

I have 5 little nephews who I love to hang out with. They are cool little dudes with A LOT of energy that can sometimes be hard to keep up with. Usually I’m visiting them at their houses or on neutral ground like my folks place which is good because those places are filled with THEIR toys. But every now and again they venture into town to visit uncle Mike at his apartment. Now I pride myself on being “cool” uncle Mike, the uncle who will get on the floor and play dinky cars or go run around the backyard. Now it’s very hard to remain cool uncle Mike when they come to my house and see the shelves and shelves of toys that they aren’t allowed to play with. I’m not a total jerk, I always let them open up one of my various bins of toys and let them play with something of the less breakable variety. Of course they don’t want what’s in the bins, they want what’s on the shelves and in the cases. Well one day they were visiting and when they started to grab for things I reached for my Godzilla figures from the top shelf and asked if they’d ever heard of him. Of course they hadn’t so I threw in my final wars DVD and watched them marvel at the Monster Battle Royal on the screen. After that they wanted to play with Godzilla which was great because it got them interested in the Big G and also because you can’t break those Godzilla toys. They’re big hollow plastic with very few moving parts. These things could survive an afternoon in the sandbox no problem. So I very much enjoyed watching them play with Godzilla and his adversaries and it got me thinking, these kids need some rubber dinosaurs. All they have are trucks at home, when I was a kid I had a whole drawer of rubber dinosaurs which I could integrate into whatever else I was playing. Oh no! Cobra Commander has unleashed an army of dinosaurs on New York! Jeepers! The dino-bots have gone awol back to the savage land! Crikey! The ninja turtles have been sent back in time! Do you see what I’m saying? Dinosaurs are very versatile. So when Christmas rolled around I got them some cars of course but then I also gave them a bag filled with dollar store rubber dinos. Watching lil Tyler run around Allosaurus in hand saying Grrr! Grrr! was just awesome and made me nostalgic for the rubber dinosaurs I had as a kid.

Well I was at Toys R Us the other day and when I couldn’t find anything interesting (other than a few star wars figures) I ventured away from the “boys” section and into the educational toys area to see what their rubber dinosaur selection looked like. It was there that I found this guy, Spinosaurus. For those of you not be familiar with this guy, go rent or download or whatever Jurassic Park III. This guy is bad as hell and he even takes a T-Rex to school to let you know that there’s a new king of the dinosaurs in town. Apparently these guys were the largest carnivorous land dinosaurs ever though they also lived in the water like crocodiles. As for the toy itself it’s pretty sweet. he’s not hollow and rubber like the ones I had as a kid, he’s a big solid piece of plastic. The detailing is much more realistic than my old guys as well lacking the big googly red or yellow eyes. The body is textured with scales and the face while not overly aggressive looking has got a sinister kinda sneer like you’d see on a crocodile just before he eats your face off. The figure is not posable at all so it’s a good thing they placed him in a good pose for display or play. This was made by a company called Schleich and I cruised their website when I got home with this guy. I think I may pick up a few more of these. You know, for the kids to play with. 8 out of 10.

Just a note, Since I started this blog a little more than month ago I always intended to take my own pictures rather than snag them from the internet. Well Vanessa got me a camera for my birthday so this post features my first attempt at photography. I’ll keep working on it.

Thanks dude. I’m gonna keep working on perfecting my pics. My buddy told me last night that you can buy a mini studio for like 100 bucks that let’s you take good quality pics of objects like this for ebay sellers and stuff. May look into it.